Welcome to the newest frontier in gaming: battles and scenes at the scale of armies and fleets, all active at once with no trickery around loading screens or off-screen abstractions. Star Swarm is a real-time demo of Oxide Games’ Nitrous engine, which pits two AI-controlled fleets against each other in a furious space battle.

“Useful if you want to benchmark and compare hardware, or if you just straight up want to look at some pretty laser beams and explosions.”
Kotaku

About This Software

Welcome to the newest frontier in gaming: battles and scenes at the scale of armies and fleets, all active at once with no trickery around loading screens or off-screen abstractions.

Star Swarm is a real-time demo of Oxide Games’ Nitrous engine, which pits two AI-controlled fleets against each other in a furious space battle. Originally conceived as an internal stress test, Oxide decided to release Star Swarm so that the public can share our vision of what we think the future of gaming can be. The simulation in Star Swarm shows off Nitrous’ ability to have thousands of individual units onscreen at once, each running their own physics, AI, pathfinding, and threat assessments.

Nitrous uses the power of its proprietary SWARM (Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model) technology to achieve incredible performance on modern, multi-core computer hardware. SWARM allows Nitrous to do things previously thought impossible in real-time 3D rendering, like Object Space Lighting -- the same techniques used in the film industry -- and having thousands of unique individual units onscreen at once.

Note that Star Swarm is not a deterministic simulation -- the AI and everything else is being computed in real time, so you will get slightly different results from multiple executions even on the same hardware. Unfortunately, achieving 100% determinism with the highly threaded nature of the Nitrous engine is an unrealistic goal.

The Nitrous engine is already in use for two games currently in production: an unannounced title from Oxide Games and Stardock’s Star Control reboot. Nitrous is also available for licensing to interested game developers.

You’ve got to see it to believe it. Download Star Swarm for free now to see what your gaming PC can do with the next-generation Nitrous engine.

Key Features

Up to 10,000+ units onscreen at once – Imagine what kind of games can be made when developers can count on simulating battles and scenes at this scale

Benchmark mode generates performance information – Since Star Swarm is a dynamic simulation rather than a canned demo, run it several times to see what Nitrous’ real-world gaming performance is on your machine

Does what it says it does. It's a simple stress test or benchmark for your PC. Here's what I thought about it (note: I ran my benchmark testing on "Extreme" with everything maxed out):

Pro's -

- Demanding on the PC, as it should be. Puts thousands of units on the screen with explosions, physics, and more all going at the same time.- Exciting to watch. Most benchmarks are boring, slow, and I end up falling asleep to it or having to leave the computer. With this, I was watching dogfights and capital ship battles to see who would win.- Easy to use and easier to install. The startup is simple, make a few choices on the menu and launch. Runs for 360 seconds on the timed run.

Con's -

- Not many options. I wasn't given a choice to choose resolution, or any specific graphical settings. Options were, "Extreme", "High", "Medium" and "Low". There is a "Custom" option but no means within the application to change the settings (looks like you'll have to go into the .ini file to do that). - Readout/results were minimal. I was hoping for more numbers and a more in depth result screen. This didn't have it. All it provided was this:

Now the upside here is the Mantle support for AMD users. It helped me get a better feel for my system/GPU and where I stand. I compare this to 3DMark 11 and it falls short. 3DMark shows much more extensive information and provides in which to compare to other users. The website shows a ranking for each users test and allows you to see what components they have that might have made a difference.

Example, I ran 3DMark and found I was 8216 ranked. Another person was similar, and the number one with my same CPU and GPU had 12,000 points. I was able to look into their build and see that they were running a second graphics card and had overclocked it for the test. That was nice to know and physically see what a second card might do for me.

3DMark as well as this, is also free. You'll need to pay in 3DMark to unlock additional features, resolutions, etc that you don't have to do here. That's the downside to that software.

All in all, this is a worthwhile test that really does put the stress on your system. I'm satisfied with the results and could definitely see where my system struggled through the large scale battles (with explosions, laser fire, and more all going on at the same time). As I said, the biggest plus about it, this was just fun to watch (unlike 3DMark which I actually fell asleep to).

Had my average FPS increase from 30 to 42, when using Mantle, at maxed out settings, so I'm pretty happy with the results. Hopefully, the developers won't get payed off by NVIDIA and use this great new technology to make true next-gen titles.

A pretty good stress test. This Star Swarm stress test I found while looking at some free tools I could use, is really one of the better stress tests I have seen. Its free so you can try it at your leisure, if your game still runs normally once you get 5000+ units on screen at once, you are prepared.

This engine truely is the future of space RTS games, its difficult to imagine how much better a game like homeworld 2 would be if this engine was implimented. For anyone who is reading this I recommend you try this software, you really will be astonised at how awesome it looks and handles.

Also if you are using a direct x card turn off anti-alising during the test, it will make a difference i promise :)